But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge?
Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University.
Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful.
That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem.
It's getting more oxygen to your brain.
And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.
Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this.
And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease.
It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time.
But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this.